Sunday, January 06, 2013

Recently, a Shell drilling vessel, the Kulluk, broke free from it's towing lines in a storm and ran aground. Personnel on the platform had to be rescued by the Coast Guard and there is now a major effort to refloat the Kulluk and ensure there is no secondary damage from oil leaks and such. Neven (who else) has a good summary of the situation and can be relied on to update as sensible.

Michael Tobis last month asked Eli to explain why the Department of the Interior was going after Charles Monnett. The Kulluk is the short answer, more specifically BOEM wanting to approve Shell's drilling plans for the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. Email leaks from Monnett were used to tie Shell, BOEM and BSEE up in court, delaying
the issuance of permits four years from 2008 to late 2012 and indeed, this was the only ground that at the conclusion of their farcical investigation that the DOI Inspector General cited to reprimand Monnett.

A good summary with links to original documents of the final court decision allowing the drilling can be found on the Foreign Policy Blog.

On May 25, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Bureau of Ocean
Energy Management’s (BOEM) August 2011 decision to permit Shell to drill
in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off Alaska’s north shore. The Native
Village of Point Hope and the Inupiat Community of the North Slope had
challenged the decision in court, as did non-profit organizations such
as Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Sierra Club.
This is the third time that the government has had to defend its
approval of Shell’s offshore drilling plans in court. The indigenous
groups and NGOs sued the Bureau for approving Shell’s exploration plan,
claiming that BOEM “failed to discharge its obligations under the Outer
Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) (PDF available here) in approving Shell Offshore Inc.’s plan for exploratory oil drilling in the Beaufort Sea.”

Drilling in the Chukchi Sea was approved August 30, and on Sept 20, 2012 approval was given to move the Kulluk into the Beaufort Sea to begin preliminary work

WASHINGTON — As part of the Obama Administration’s
all-of-the-above energy strategy to expand safe and responsible domestic
energy production, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement
(BSEE) Director James A. Watson today announced that Shell will be
allowed to move forward with certain limited preparatory activities in
the Beaufort Sea offshore Alaska. Today’s action builds upon BSEE’s
authorization on August 30 for Shell to conduct similar preparatory
activities in the Chukchi Sea, in preparation for potential development
activities in the future. . . .

BSEE inspectors are maintaining their full-time presence on the Noble Discoverer drill ship in the Chukchi, and will also be onboard the Kulluk
drilling vessel full-time during its operations in the Beaufort Sea,
to provide continuous oversight and monitoring of all approved
activities.

Shell was anxious to get started given that it has already poured $4.5 billion into the project, money that was not earning a return as long as the issue remained in court, but it's rush has lead to one equipment malfunction after another. The Foreign Policy Blog has a statement from Shell that is indicative of the pressure on them to start seeing a return from their investment

Shell spokesman Curtis Smith stated, “There are other appeals still
pending, such as those of our air quality permits, but the favorable
ruling on the exploration plan is a substantial boost for us.” The EPA
granted Shell ten air quality permits in September 2011 to permit the
Noble Discoverer drillship, the Kulluk drilling unit, and a support
fleet of icebreakers, oil spill response vessels, and supply ships to
drill in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas for up to 120 days each year. As
Shell is hopeful for its prospects this summer, both the Noble
Discoverer and Kulluk are being outfitted and “winterized” in a Seattle
shipyard in preparation to sail to Dutch Harbor, Alaska in mid-June.

In September, they damaged a containment dome designed as one of the layers to deal with possible well blow outs. That meant that the only work that could be started was to drill top holes, sea floor infrastructure needed before drilling deep for oil and gas and that is why the Kulluk was being moved into from the Beaufort Sea as late in the year as it was. They moved the equipment up there as fast as they could in September, even without the containment structure, to drill the top holes The Kulluk grounding may be the last straw.

Which now allows Eli to show MT the little men behind the curtain. The idiotic act of Eric May, DOI IG special inspector was a futile effort to find something else to hang Monnett with. Dr. Monnett had a strong whistle blower defense, especially because the 9th Circuit had ruled in 2008 that the emails showed BOEM had messed up their assessment of the safety of Shell's drilling plans.

PEER knew damn well what was going on and hid the cheese. Now some, not Eli of course, might look at this and advise Scott Mandia to take care when dealing with PEER. Those folk play inside baseball

Jeffrey Gleason was collateral damage. Eli thinks that he left BOEM and Alaska as the only way of getting out from between his bosses and Monnett.

The remaining question is how high up in DOI the effort to get rid of Monnett and hide the reason why went, especially because of the intersection with Steiner, the Sea Grant Program and NOAA This is key from an environmental point of view, because it speaks to the Obama administration's attitude toward the Arctic environment.

UPDATE: Unfortunately it looks like the Keystone pipeline is a done deal. Rick Piltz points to that as the reason EPA administrator Lisa Jackson threw in the towel

Yesterday, the 7th, at shortly after noon Alaska ST (4:00 EST) the Kulluk anchored inside the mouth of Kiliuda Bay with the “support vessels” Alert, Lauren Foss and Corbin Foss connected to the Kulluk and her anchor handler/tug/ice breaker, the Aiviq, disconnected. The Warrior, Ocean Wave, Perseverance, Nanuq and USCG Alex Haley are standing by in the area. Pictures of the later part of the tow are at:

The first scene in the video, ~8:30am local from the lighting, the Aiviq is in the foreground. The helo at the end is an Army Chinook from Ft Wainwright adjacent to Fairbanks

Tenney,

The time stamps in your link are UTC and local time is 9 hours later. (Really 10 hrs by the sun, but Alaska “time” is “daylight saving” in winter, and double DST in the summer to better sync with people in the rest of the US).

"Many of the best things we do at PEER, we cannot talk about. Working behind the scenes, we have saved the careers of hundreds of conscientious public servants, often by talking them out of publicly blowing the whistle and convincing them to work through PEER instead to expose a problem."

In December 2006, Stang left MMS and set up Stang Consulting. From 2007 through 2009, Stang was a principal adviser to Shell Exploration and Development Co. — one of the major bidders on leases off the Alaska coast."

Your link to the leaked emails and the story by PEER show that Shell had much bigger plans for the Arctic than the Environmental Impact Study at that time called for. Plans that MMS was not disclosing, and the internal discussion within MMS was shielded from FOIA requests.

Interestingly enough, Monnett was not reprimanded for these emails from 2005.Instead, Monnett was reprimanded for some emails sent in 2007 and 2008 :http://www.peer.org/assets/docs/noaa/10_1_12_Monnett_reprimand.pdf

Are you sure that Monnett leaked these 2005 emails ?And if Monnett did, then why did they not show up in the IG report, or in the BOEM reprimand letter ?

Also, why does the IG spend their entire final report on Monnett's scientific paper, and an half-hearted attempt to question procedures on single-source contract acquisitions, and nothing about the emails that Monnett was reprimanded for eventually ?http://www.peer.org/assets/docs/doi/10_1_12_Monnett_IG_Report.pdf

And why the heck is Sen, Inhofe so interested in who started this investigation ?http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/11/1005950/-eSci-Inhofe-Joins-Inquisition-of-Polar-Bear-Scientist

This case is the most bizarre witch hunt on scientists I've ever seen, and I have the feeling that we are just barely scratching the surface on this story of political power play, fossil fuel interests, and bending the rules of engagement within the OUR Department of the Interior and the McCarty-style inquisitions by its Inspector General.

I'm predicting that at some point in time somebody will make a documentary movie about this crazy episode in US history.

Sorry Rob, Eli will have to go look for the others. Pending review it would seem that Monnett would be the logical one to have leeked the entire raft of emails.

As to why the IG kept on blathering, they had to, or admit that the whole thing was an effort to sideline Monnett for the leaks, and the leaked material showed that BOEM was in bed with Shell. This may turn into a real hunt though. There are lots of comments on the Email, but find links to the originals is not easy. Oh well another job for when Eli is retired.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they occasionally heed his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.